Posted on: Wednesday, June 9, 2004

VOLCANIC ASH
Gov. Lingle on national stage

By David Shapiro

Gov. Linda Lingle says that as an American Jew, her recent visit to Israel was a personal trip of a lifetime.

This would be understandable, as many elected leaders visit places in the world where they have cultural roots.

But Lingle's entourage of more than two dozen staff and supporters, and her well-publicized meetings with Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, made it more than a personal pilgrimage.

Clearly, our governor was out to make a splash.

We can find the politics of Lingle's trip in the news that President Bush sees Jewish voters as a major target of opportunity in his struggle for re-election against Sen. John Kerry.

Bush received only 19 percent of the Jewish vote against Al Gore in 2000, and his campaign thinks he can bump it to a third or better this year thanks to aggressively pro-Israel policies in the Middle East.

Expect Lingle, one of two Jewish governors and the only Republican, to be enlisted to stump for the president in key swing states with high Jewish populations.

In this context, Lingle's high-profile trip, which included a stopover in Los Angeles to accept the Golda Meir Award, significantly raised her national visibility among Jewish voters.

A big question is how it will play in Hawai'i, where Lingle, our first Republican governor in 40 years, is leading a GOP effort to win control of the state House of Representatives — or a least gain enough seats to sustain her vetoes.

She's succeeded in Democratic Hawai'i with a sharp focus on local issues — education, the economy, honesty in government — that won over independent Democrats frustrated by their own party's resistance to change.

Lingle's problem is that Bush and his war in Iraq appear especially unpopular among these same independent Democrats, who are returning to their party to work against the president's re-election.

Bush has little chance of carrying Hawai'i in November. If Republicans let him and his conservative policies that are out of favor here become the issue in legislative races, the Democrats win.

Alienating independent Democrats who supported her two years ago could also threaten Lingle's own chances of re-election in 2006.

Republicans seemed to recognize this at their state convention last weekend, focusing candidate workshops on building local campaigns around local issues.

But in her speech to the convention on Saturday, Lingle veered from the course and urged Republicans who campaign in local races to also talk up Bush and his policies.

What a change from 2000, when as state GOP chairwoman, Lingle kept her distance from the Bush campaign here in her successful single-minded pursuit of legislative victories.

This year, she's made herself chairman of the lost-cause Bush campaign in Hawai'i, a role traditionally delegated to the lieutenant governor.

Plainly, Lingle has developed a taste for the national spotlight since taking office.

In addition to her trip to Israel, she went to Iraq in February to support the president, just as Democrats in the Legislature were trampling her education agenda.

At national governors meetings, she's eager to get before TV cameras to uncritically praise Bush policies on Iraq, taxes and underfunded education initiatives that other Republican governors have begun to question.

It makes you wonder if Lingle is looking past her job as governor to some future role on the national stage.

If she doesn't get back on the message that put her where she is, those stars in her eyes may turn out to be a premonition of a Democratic knockout punch coming her way.

David Shapiro, a veteran Hawai'i journalist, can be reached by e-mail at dave@volcanicash.net.